The Greatest Secret: How Being God's Adopted Children Changes EverythingSample

 Adoption – Family Likeness   

She is tall, I am short. She has big beautiful curly blonde hair. I have a diminishing amount of black hair. She has ancestry from one side of the globe, and I, well it's complicated, but basically from the opposite side of the globe. My adopted daughter has no biological connection with my ancestry. And yet strangers often remark how alike we are. It happened so often it got me wondering. What on earth were people seeing? I asked around a bit and this is what people told me. We both have eyes that sparkle. We both smile a lot. We are both energetic and bubbly. We both talk constantly. We love being out and about and meeting people. We remember faces. We love music. We relish joking around and winding up other members of the family. We can both eat crisps until they are coming out of our ears. The list went on. It turns out that even though there is little similarity physically, people nevertheless see a similarity because of behaviour and personality. Nurture has trumped nature. 

This little insight helped me a lot when it came to understanding holiness. First, because becoming like God and like Jesus may be a slow developing process of relational osmosis, however differently you start out. Second, because sometimes others can see this more in you than you can notice yourself. And third, because when adoption is involved, the shared traits of family likeness can be both more surprising and more significant than we might imagine. 

Peter clearly notes our status as God’s children, and the link between nature and nurture, being and behaving. We are to be holy, and do holy. Holiness is to mark who we are, and what we do. 

It is God’s work to make us beautiful, good, holy. It is his purpose, not just to brush us up a little, but to conform us to the image or likeness of Jesus. The word for likeness is the root of our word ‘icon’. These days the word ‘icon’ usually conjures up the idea of the little images used to represent apps and computer programmes. One click on the icon and the full programme is launched. This is a great illustration of our role in the world. We are to be God’s icons, representing him in the world so that people can look at us and the way we care for one another, and recognise the family likeness.